Display brightness is one of the main power eating culprits in laptops. As a result, many modern operating systems including Ubuntu are optimized to automatically adjust the brightness so as to maximize laptop’s battery life.

If you run Ubuntu on a laptop you might have noticed that Ubuntu dims the display when the system is idle and is not connected to the AC power. This feature is definitely helpful for increasing battery life but can be extremely annoying if you are reading a long web page or article. Now if you are tormented by this feature you can either disable it or extend the time that screen goes dim.

Disabling ‘Dim Display When Idle” feature

1. Go to System > Preferences > Power Management.
2. In the Power Management Preferences window, click on the On Battery Power tab.
3. Remove the check of both “Reduce backlight brightness” and “Dim display when idle” options.

Increasing the Amount of Time to Dim the Screen

If you are interested to change the amount of screen dim time or the brightness amount, you’ll need to use Configuration Editor:

1. Press ALT + F2 and in the Run Application window, type gconf-editor.
2. Go to apps > gnome-power-managment > backlight.
3. Now change the value of idle_dim_time. You may also want to change other settings such as the value of idle_brightness.

Truth to be told, Ubuntu knows a lot about your laptop’s battery. It knows exactly where it has been made or what is the design capacity or last full capacity of it. So if you are curious to know more about your laptop battery you my want to do this:

1. Head over here: /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0
2. There are two files encompassing the information we are looking for: info and state. Try info at first and you will be amazed by the amount of information you find there. You might also want to take a look at this article about mAh.

Here is a quick way to create a keyboard shortcut for launching Terminal:

1. Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.
2. Scroll down until you find Run a Terminal which is located under Desktop. Here you can set your preferred shortcut for launching Terminal.